Tongaat Hulett's sugar mills lead South Africa in recovery performance

IOL News

03-07-2025

Sugar cane on its way to be processed at Tongaat Hulett's Maidstone Mill. Tongaat's three South African sugar mills, Maidstone, Amatikulu and Felixton have benefited from substantial capital investment over the past three years, following years of disinvestment.
Image: Karen Sandison/Independent Newspapers
Tongaat Hulett's (THL) three South African sugar mills, Maidstone, Amatikulu and Felixton, which benefited from capital investment since the group went into business rescue, have ranked as the top three nationally for sugar recovery in the current sugar milling season.
The recognition indicates the scale of THL's operational turnaround since entering business rescue in October 2022 - the group said in a statement Thursday its mills were now not only stable, but leading performance across the broader South African sugar sector.
Tongaat Hulett CEO Gavin Dalgleish, together with the Business Rescue Practitioners (BRPs), recently met with grower representatives in a series of engagements. These meetings focused on sharing updates about the company's progress under business rescue, as well as the improvements seen across its milling and refining operations.
The group's three mills, refinery and animal feed plant, which had previously suffered years of under-investment, benefited from a R1.45 billion capital injection over the past three years, secured through the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC).
'The result is a marked improvement in operational performance, with cane being crushed much more efficiently and reliably than before and a renewed sense of confidence among growers, staff, and industry partners,' Dalgleish said.
The capital upgrades were accompanied by the recruitment of key technical staff and an investment in training and development of employees.
'The investments made were not just in machinery, but also in our people – and the results are clear. Our teams are now less focused on reactive maintenance and more focused on performance improvement. It's this shift in mindset that's powering real, sustainable change,' said Dalgleish.
He said these efforts had translated into year-on-year improvements in key production and efficiency metrics for the current milling season. According to independent industry benchmarking, THL's performance in these metrics had placed its mills among the top in the country – exceeding the industry benchmark standards by a greater margin than anyone else, said Dalgleish.
The benchmark standards include the recoverable value metric, which measures the value of molasses and sugar recovered from the sugarcane delivered by an individual grower, as well as the crystal recovery efficiency metric, which measures the percentage of sucrose extracted from the cane that is successfully crystallised into marketable sugar.
During the meetings, it became clear that growers placed strong value on consistent, high-efficiency milling, and a reliable mill was worth more to them than any other short-term price incentives.
'Any grower would have noticed that the Maidstone mill is certainly performing better than it has in the past decade,' said Pratish Sharma, Senior Maidstone Grower and local SA Canegrowers representative.
'The investments in the mills give us great confidence that we're going to have a mill capable of crushing our crop. That is crucial, because a high-performing mill gives growers the confidence to invest in and expand their own farms,' said Sharma.